On Saturday, October 30, 2004, at 06:07 AM, Sebastiaan Molenaar wrote:
On Sat, 2004-10-30 at 06:54, Rick Thomas wrote: <snip> </snip>ROM compatible disk and CD drivers. b) They can put up with the vagaries of Open firmware and quik for their particular hardware.<snip> </snip>Personally, I think alternative (b) is not viable either -- it's just too much pain for anyone to put up with long-term -- though there are undoubtedly folks out there who will try it for a while before they give up. Fortunately, alternative (c) is a workable<snip> </snip> Now my question is, why isn't it possible to get this more stable? (guess wich group I'm in) Is it just that the apple OF isn't stable or is quik not stable?
A bit of both.
I understand apple OF is different on pretty much every oldworld ppcbut it should still be possible to find the workaround for every differentone and once it's working it should keep working doesn't it?
Indeed, the BSD folks have done exactly that. Quik is their preferred boot-loader for OldWorld Macs. They have a huge table with each model of Mac and the particular workarounds/patches for that model to make its OF boot via quik.
To my mind, the fundamental problem is that patches to Open Firmware, once made, don't last. OF patches reside in the PRAM. If you ever boot MacOS{8,9} on a patched machine you will have to clear the PRAM and thereby loose all your patches. Also, the PRAM can be cleared by a power failure if your PRAM battery has run down -- a common problem on older machines. If the patches get lost, you have to re-patch, which can be a pain if your machine has the kind of OF that wants a terminal on the serial port.
That said, I have two old 6500 PowerMacs that boot via quik and have been running that way for over four years. They are sitting in my machine room on a diesel-backed UPS and haven't been rebooted more than a half-dozen times in those four years. I've had to re-patch one of them a couple of times. It's not fun, but it's not impossible either. Fortunately, neither of these machines is "mission critical" -- they can afford to be offline for a week or so if they loose their PRAM patches while I'm on vacation.
Rick